by Aly Martinez
I was still struggling to collect myself when the door clicked behind them. A second later, Liv climbed into my lap.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Nope.” I sucked in a deep breath, holding it as I stared up into her dark-brown eyes.
The warmth only she possessed slid through me, soothing me from the inside out. Her tender gaze slowed the vortex in my head, and with a slight reassuring tip of her lips, the world suddenly became manageable again.
“But I will be,” I finished.
“We both will be.” She brushed her lips across mine. “Every. Single. Day, Q.”
It was a promise.
And the only words that could ever quell the anxiety blazing within me.
“Every. Single. Day,” I repeated back to her.
Six months later…
“GET YOUR FUCKING HANDS UP!” I yelled at Quarry after he’d taken a hard right. “What the hell are you doing?” I shouted over the sold-out crowd in the same Vegas arena we had almost been ruined in all those years earlier.
“Give him a minute!” Liv shot back, nervously twirling her wedding ring around her finger.
After the whole Davenport incident, Quarry had thrown one of his testosterone-induced temper tantrums and insisted Liv marry him as soon as possible. She’d reluctantly agreed, and then we’d watched yet another one of his fits when he realized “as soon as possible” wasn’t the very next day. As usual, Liv had talked him off the crazy-train, and three months later, they’d said, “I do,” in front of over five hundred guests in an insanely over-the-top wedding in Chicago.
“He’s not going to have a minute if he doesn’t get his head together,” I retorted, flinching when he caught another blow.
“He’s got this,” she assured. “You know Q can’t do anything without being dramatic. This is just the buildup.”
“He does love the drama,” Ash stated in agreement.
“You are entirely too chill right now,” I told Ash. “Just so you know, if he wins this fight, we make double on the next one.”
Her eyes flashed wide, and then she shot to her feet, shouting, “Get your fucking hands up, Q!”
I laughed without dragging my eyes off the action in the ring.
The bell rang, and Till and Slate climbed into Quarry’s corner, forcing him on to the stool and icing his swollen left eye. Till’s hands were signing a mile a minute, and Quarry was smiling and shaking his head at everything he said.
Little shit.
Some things never change.
At least they didn’t until I caught Liv signing to him, You’re scaring me.
Quarry’s face turned to stone, and he quickly nodded at her.
“You want to sit down?” Ash asked, ducking under my arm.
“No.” I smiled.
Tipping her head to the side, she asked, “What are you smiling about? I figured you’d be cranky Flint after that round.”
I flashed her a wide grin. “This is the dream, Ash. For all of us. I’m standing here, with my wife, in the building where I was shot and paralyzed over a decade ago. Till won his fight. He’s no longer deaf. Eliza’s safe. My father is in prison. And we all have the opportunity to replace the memories of that God-awful night with this moment right here.” I squeezed her tight into my side and kissed the top of her head. “My little brother is about to achieve his lifelong goal of fighting for the world heavyweight championship, where, win or lose, he’ll make enough money to support even our great-great-grandkids. When we were kids, we couldn’t even dream of something this big. And look at us now. We have it all. Cranky Flint doesn’t even exist in this moment.”
“Stop showboating and finish this shit!” I signed, squirting water in Quarry’s mouth.
If his wicked grin was any indication, though, he didn’t give a damn what I’d said. He was going to finish the fight the way he wanted. Such was life with Quarry. And it had only gotten worse over the last few months.
When Davenport had been deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial, Quarry had changed. I’d expected him to do what he usually did and get pissed off and show his ass in one of his usual hotheaded ways. He hadn’t done any of that though. Quarry had actually chilled out. It was like that wedding ring Liv had slipped on his finger held some sort of magical powers—or, at the very least, tranquilizers. When the judge had issued his verdict, I hadn’t been required to wrestle Q to the ground in order to keep court security from tasering him. He hadn’t even flinched, actually. He’d just walked out of the courthouse with his arm draped around his new wife and never looked back.
Liv was a saint. I’d spent my entire life up until that point trying to keep Quarry from overflowing, and she could do it with a single glance. Like the one she’d just shot him from outside the ropes. It was exactly why he was smiling. And the only reason I had any faith that this might actually be the final round.
As Q pushed to his feet, I followed Slate out of the ring.
“He gonna stop screwing around?” Slate asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
I shrugged. “Hell if I know. Ask that one.” I pointed over to Liv, who was nervously toying with her ring but doing it while sporting a mischievous smile that matched my brother’s.
My eyes drifted to Eliza, who was doodling on a sketchpad, not paying any attention to the fight. She loved boxing. She just hated watching Quarry. I couldn’t imagine how she was going to handle it when little Slate got in the ring. He was already chomping at the bit, but she’d made me promise to wait until he was at least eight. Only a few more months.
As if she could sense me watching her, her gaze flipped to mine. “You did it,” she mouthed as she signed.
I arched an eyebrow and signed back, “Did what?”
“This.” She motioned her finger down the front row, where Liv, Ash, and Flint were all sitting. “That.” She pointed to Quarry in the ring. “All of it.”
I shook my head as the bell rang, starting a new round. “They did this.”
She smiled and then tipped her chin to the ring.
I looked back up in time to see Quarry storm forward, dodging a jab before landing a combination ending with a knockout left hook.
The arena exploded in loud cheers as the ref started to issue the count.
My heart exploded when he got to ten.
He did it.
He fucking did it.
Pride soared.
Flint and Liv appeared at the ring before I even had a chance to climb inside. Liv wasn’t exactly one to adhere the formalities, so she was in the ring with her legs locked around his waist before his opponent had even made it off the mat.
My mind was reeling as I spun in a circle, listening to the crowd chanting our last name. It made me a bitch, but the emotions of it all were staggering. Photographers clicked away, capturing history. The crowd roared, celebrating right along with us. Every major network on television had a cameraman on the skirting, fighting for the best angle.
I could have been blind and still would have had the best seat in the house just because I was his big brother.
That was how championships were supposed to be won. Quarry didn’t have to rush from the ring to find out his brother had been shot. His pregnant wife hadn’t been kidnapped. He got to actually enjoy it.
And, because of that, I was wearing an impossibly wide smile and enjoying it too.
Amongst the chaos, I found myself looking for Eliza once again. Ringside was a mess, but I finally located her standing on her chair in the front row, holding her sketchpad up. Scrawled across it, in big letters, were the words: This is reality.
I couldn’t fight back the emotions any longer.
Reality didn’t seem like the right word at all.
That moment felt a whole lot like fantasy to me.
Standing in the middle of the ring while thousands of cameras flashed around us, I kissed Liv one last time before lowering her back to the feet.
“Go. Celebrate,” she signed, backing into my
corner.
The sound of the announcer’s voice was so loud that even my weak ears couldn’t miss it. “Winner and new heavyweight champion of the world, Quarry ‘The Stone Fist’ Page!”
The ref made a move to grab my glove, but I had other plans. Evading him, I walked to my corner. Tearing at the tape on my gloves with my teeth, I yanked them off without even asking for help.
Slate smiled proudly as I lifted both fists and bowed to him with immeasurable gratitude.
“Thank you,” I mouthed.
He continued to grin and simply nodded, wrapping his arm around Liv’s shoulders.
“Yo! Come here!” I yelled at Till, who was staring at Eliza in the crowd. Then I turned, snatched Flint’s cane out of his hand, and tossed it into the corner. “Come on.” I dipped my shoulder under his arm to help him balance.
The three of us walked to the center of the ring together.
I hadn’t won that fight alone.
I wouldn’t have even made it to the fight without them.
Sure, we all had wives now. They had kids. We owned homes—huge ones. Our bank accounts held more zeros than we could have ever imagined. Yet, somehow, we were still the three broke kids in stained shirts and dirty jeans, eating ramen noodles in our filthy kitchen.
And that was exactly how I knew we had truly made it.
Till, despite the fact that he’d been forced into parenthood at twenty-one years old, still smiled with the crooked grin and mind-blowing confidence I’d spent my entire life trying to mimic.
Flint walked with a cane, yet every single step he took had a purpose. Whether it was digging clothes from the free bins at the local church or negotiating a sixty-million-dollar contract, he’d always been there for me no matter what.
I wasn’t the only champion in the ring that night.
So, with Till on my right and Flint on my left, I lifted all of our fists in victory.
“I’M NERVOUS!”
Quarry laughed and shook his head. “Why?”
“What if my voice is annoying?”
He looked at the audiologist. “Any chance this baby comes with a mute button?”
I slapped his leg. “I’m serious!”
“So am I!” he teased, brushing my hair over my shoulder.
Rolling my eyes, I crossed my arms and rested them on my swollen belly.
Quarry had been wrong the day he’d proposed. Nothing stays the same forever. Over the years, everything had changed for us. However, it wasn’t a bad thing, because we’d changed together.
After the Davenport incident, my life had flipped upside down. The press had launched full force on the community center when the story broke. While I had been insanely proud of everything I had accomplished while working there, it had been clear that it was in everyone’s best interest for me to resign. Once Quarry had won the title, he’d been even more famous than before, and as his wife, my life had been slung into the spotlight right along with him. I couldn’t teach anymore, but sign language was still my passion. So I became an advocate and spokeswoman for the National Association of the Deaf. With a little help from Q, we were able to raise enough money to fund over twenty new ASL programs across the country.
Three years after Quarry had first won the title belt, his hearing suddenly took a significant turn downward, and within a few months, he was completely deaf. As to be expected, I flipped. He just laughed and held me. I was six months pregnant at the time, and what I had expected to be a meltdown as my husband entered the world of silence turned into a hormone-induced fit of epic proportions. Quarry wasn’t concerned in the least though. He was sad that he was going to miss hearing the baby cry for the first time, but he simply stated that holding his son safe in his arms would be more than enough to make up for it. And the day March Leo Page was born, I knew he’d been right. Watching my husband—my soul mate—tough, tattooed fighter, Quarry “The Stone Fist” Page, holding his son was the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen. And that said a lot because Quarry had given me a beautiful life.
Kids were another thing that changed our lives tremendously. March was born with my dark skin and eyes, but he was one hundred percent his father’s brand of trouble. And that did not bode well for us. We adored being parents, but we both questioned if we could handle another one. We loved March more than life, but one was enough for us.
Or so we thought.
After Ash and Flint adopted a little girl, baby fever hit me—hard. I feared Quarry’s head was going to explode when I told him that I wanted to try for another child. March was starting first grade, and we’d already made several large donations to his private school to ensure he wouldn’t get kicked out—again. Things were finally starting to calm down for us, so Quarry put his foot down on the baby thing. Which caused me to put my foot down and reject his definitive no. We argued for weeks until he finally shut down all further conversations in order to focus on his next fight. I was pissed, but he swore we could revisit the topic afterwards.
Quarry successfully defended his title eight times over the course of his reign in the ring. And, even after he’d lost it, he remained a substantial competitor in the sport. Proof being that, even at thirty-three years old, he was offered another shot at his old belt. A shot he not only took, but also won. That wasn’t all that shocking though. He’d been born to be a champion.
However, it was at the press conference after the fight where he truly surprised everyone—including me—by announcing his retirement. When a reporter asked him what he was planning to do next, his gaze had bounced to mine as he proudly answered, “First, I’m gonna knock up my wife. Second, I’m getting a cochlear implant so I can finally hear my little man screaming at me. And, lastly, I have no fucking clue. But one and two are more than enough to keep me busy for a few years.”
Yep. He was still breathtakingly unapologetic. That would never change.
And that was how I ended up eight months pregnant with our daughter, Quinn Eliza Page, and sitting in a doctor’s office, anxiously waiting for them to activate my husband’s cochlear implant. The entire Page family was not-so-patiently waiting in the hall. Actually, it seemed like Quarry was the only relaxed one. Even March, who was digging through all the doctor’s drawers, seemed edgy.
“You ready?” the doctor asked from behind his computer.
“No!” I exclaimed.
Quarry chuckled and squeezed my leg. “I think he was talking to me, Rocky.”
I chewed on my bottom lip. “Right. Well, my answer remains the same.”
“Look at me,” he urged.
I peeked up at him, tears already pooling in my eyes.
“What the hell? Why are you crying?” His face gentled. Tossing an arm around my shoulders, he pulled me into his side.
“I have no idea! It’s just a big change.” I sniffled.
“Come on. This is nothing. Now, in a few weeks when you give birth to that hellion growing inside you, that’s going to be a change. This though? It’s the easy stuff, Rocky.”
It was easy. Especially compared to everything we had already overcome together.
Quarry’s dad was definitely one of those hard things for the two of us. Actually, he was a tough subject for all the Page brothers. Clay had had quite the rap sheet, including blowing parole, so when it had come time for sentencing, it was clear he’d never walk as a free man again. This bothered me more than I could ever explain. I owed my life to “Don Blake,” but the rest of the Page family still wore Clay’s scars.
When the truth came out about why Clay had been at the community center with me that night, everyone had seemed relieved. Watching their faces when they’d realized he’d actually done something right for once was the only happy part of the whole ordeal. And, because of that, I never could have fathomed Quarry’s reaction when I’d innocently mentioned mailing his dad a letter in prison. He’d been livid. Till had shared his opinion, but Flint, surprisingly enough, had taken my back on the issue. After multiple heated family discussions,
Till, Flint, and—yes—even Quarry had eventually given me permission to mail their father monthly pictures. This agreement had come with caveats. The two biggest being: I was never allowed to give him our address, and I wasn’t allowed to have any correspondence with him. No notes. No chats. For the love of God, no visits. Only pictures. I’d immediately agreed. All things considered, it was more than fair. And it spoke volumes about the amazing men the Page brothers had become.
“Relax,” Quarry urged, brushing his lips across my jaw. “This is a good thing.”
I swallowed hard and nodded, not even the least bit relaxed.
March suddenly flopped into the chair beside his father. “Is she seriously crying again?” he signed.
Quarry smirked and ruffled our son’s dark-brown hair. “If you think this is bad, you should have grown up with Aunt Eliza. She cried about everything, pregnant or not.”
“She still does,” he mumbled. “So, you getting new ears or what?”
Quarry’s gaze drifted back to mine, and he arched an eyebrow in question. “I don’t know. Am I?”
Drying the tears from under my eyes, I straightened in my chair. “Yeah. You’re right. This is nothing.”
Tossing his arm around the back of March’s chair, Quarry anchored his hand on my thigh. “Okay, Doc. We’re ready.”
The doctor began rattling off information, going over a few simple instructions and warning us to keep our expectations low. We had been told that sounds were easy, but it sometimes took a while for voices to become clear with the implant. And, over the last few days, I’d been obsessing over the fact that, sometimes, it didn’t work at all.
I listened with rapt attention, but Quarry barely paid him any mind and instead snuck his fingers down to tickle March’s neck.
I tapped his arm to catch his eyes then snapped, “Pay attention!”
He made teasingly wide eyes at March, which made him laugh, before turning back to me. “Okay. What in the ever-loving hell is going on with you right now? You freaked when I lost my hearing. Now, you’re freaking when I’m about to get it back?”